The ‘Great March of Return,’ orchestrated by Hamas, draws some 30,000 Palestinians to the Gaza-Israel border; riots ensue, prompting IDF snipers to shoot at main instigators; Defense Minister Lieberman warns anyone who approaches security fence is putting his life in jeopardy; Hamas leader Haniyeh: ‘Israel’s threats do not scare us.’

At least 16 Palestinians were killed and hundreds more were wounded by IDF gunfire along the Israel-Gaza border, Palestinian sources said Friday, as thousands swarmed the security fence as part of “The Great March of Return,” called for by enclave’s militant Hamas rulers.

It was the deadliest day in Gaza in several months. Eleven of the Palestinians were killed during the clashes, a farmer was killed by pre-dawn tank fire in a separate incident, and four others from IDF tank fire at an observation post in the northern Gaza Strip.

The IDF said two of the Palestinians killed were members of Hamas’s elite Nukhba force. The military also said all of the dead were terror activists aged 18 to 30. According to Palestinian reports, one of those killed was reportedly 16 while another was 33.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas declared Saturday would be a national day of mourning. “Israel is fully responsible for all of the aggression in Gaza today, and fully responsible for the death of Palestinians,” Abbas said.

He ordered the Palestinian envoy to the UN, Riyad al-Maliki, to take all immediate steps to demand international protection for the Palestinian people.

The United Nations Security Council was due to meet later on Friday to discuss the situation in Gaza, diplomats said.

…The March of Return, Hamas says, is intended to be a weeks-long peaceful demonstration advocating for the return of Palestinian refugees to Israel.

The IDF is on high alert as it sees the march as a hostile attempt by Hamas to sabotage IDF infrastructure and the Gaza security fence, and fear it may lead to a mass breach of the border.

The Palestinians are trying to return to their own “country”. A country which never existed.

The term “Palestine” (Falastin in Arabic) was an ancient name for the general geographic region that is more or less today’s Israel. The name derives from the Philistines, who originated from the eastern Mediterranean, and invaded the region in the 11th and 12th centuries B.C. The Philistines were apparently either from Greece, Crete, the Aegean Islands, and/or Ionia. They seem to be related to the Bronze Age Greeks, and they spoke a language akin to Mycenaean Greek. Their descendents, still living on the shores of the Mediterranean, greeted Roman invaders a thousand years later. The Romans corrupted the name to “Palestina,” and the area under the sovereignty of their city-states became known as “Philistia.” Six-hundred years later, the Arab invaders called the region “Falastin.”

Throughout subsequent history, the name remained only a vague geographical entity. There was never a nation of “Palestine,” never a people known as the “Palestinians,” nor any notion of “historic Palestine.” The region never enjoyed any sovereign autonomy, remaining instead under successive foreign sovereign domains from the Umayyads and Abbasids to the Fatimids, Ottomans, and British.

During the centuries of Ottoman rule, no Arabs under Turkish rule made any attempt to formulate an ideology of national identity, least of all the impoverished Arab peasantry in the region today known as Israel.

The term “Palestinian,” ironically, was used during the British Mandate period (1922-1948) to identify the Jews of British Mandatory Palestine. The Arabs of the area were known as “Arabs,” and their own designation of the region was balad esh-Sham (the province of Damascus). While some Arab nationalist writers, and coffee-shop intellectuals in Cairo or Beirut, developed the concept of Arab nationalism in large part as a response to Zionism, the terms “Palestine” and “Palestinian” were used in their traditional sense as geographic designations, not as national identities.

In early 1947, in fact, when the UN was exploring the possibility of the partition of British Mandatory Palestine into two states, one for the Jews and one for the Arabs, various Arab political and academic spokespersons spoke out vociferously against such a division because, they argued, the region was really a part of southern Syria, no such people or nation as “Palestinians” had ever existed, and it would be an injustice to Syria to create a state ex nihilo at the expense of Syrian sovereign territory.

During the 19 years from Israel’s victory in 1948 to Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War, all that remained of the UN’s partitioned territory to the “Arabs” of British Mandatory Palestine were the West Bank, under illegal Jordanian sovereignty, and the Gaza Strip, under Egyptian rule. Never during these 19 years did any Arab leader anywhere in the world argue for the right of national self-determination for the Arabs of these territories. A “Palestinian” nation and “Palestinian” people had not yet been invented.

Article 24 of the PLO’s [Palestine Liberation Organization] original founding document, the PLO Covenant, states: “This Organization (the PLO) does not exercise any regional sovereignty over the West Bank in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, in the Gaza Strip or the Himmah area.” For Arafat before the Six-Day War, Palestine was Israel. It was not the West Bank or the Gaza Strip — because the West Bank and the Gaza Strip belonged to other Arab states, and the inhabitants of these areas were not numbered among the Palestinians whose “homeland” Arafat sought to “liberate.” The only “homeland” for the PLO in 1964 was the State of Israel. However, in response to the Six Day War, the PLO revised its Covenant on July 17, 1968, to remove the operative language of Article 24, thereby newly asserting a “Palestinian” claim of sovereignty to the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

This ploy was revealed, perhaps inadvertently, to the West in a public interview with Zahir Muhse’in, a member of the PLO Executive Committee, in a March 31, 1977, interview with the Amsterdam-based newspaper Trouw:

“The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct “Palestinian people” to oppose Zionism. For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa, while as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan.”

[Yasser] Arafat himself said the same thing, on many occasions. In his authorized biography (Terrorist or Peace Maker, by Alan Hart), he is quoted saying: “[T]he Palestinian people have no national identity. I, Yasser Arafat, man of destiny, will give them that identity through conflict with Israel.”

But such admissions did not stem the enthusiasm with which these fictions were greeted by Western leaders. Within a few years, the USSR’s invention of the fictitious narrative of Palestinian national aspirations and rights of self-determination created the facade of morality and legitimacy that the terrorists needed in order to curry favor with the European Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

HAMAS (an acronym for Harakat al-Muqawamat al-Islamiyya, which is Arabic for “Islamic Resistance Movement”) is an Islamic fundamentalist group founded on December 14, 1987. As a single Arabic word rather than an acronym, “Hamas” means “zeal.” The organization’s founders were seven leading members of the Muslim Brotherhood: Ahmed Dassin, Abdel Aziz Rantisi, Ibrahim al-Yazuri, Sheikh Salih Shihada, ‘Isa al-Našhar, Muhammad Shama’a, and ‘Abd al-Fattah Dukhan. Hamas, in a sense, grew out of a 1985-86 Brotherhood movement — in which Ahmed Yassin was involved — that resolved to pursue its goal of degrading and ultimately destroying Israel by means of civil disturbance.

Describing itself as “one of the wings of the Muslim Brother[hood],” Hamas’s avowed purpose is “liberating Palestine” from its Jewish “oppressors,” whose very presence in the Middle East Hamas considers an affront to Muslims’ rightful sovereignty over the region. Hamas is best known for using violent methods — including suicide bombings against Israeli military and civilian targets — as part of its long-term strategy to destroy Israel and replace it with an Islamic Palestinian state. The U.S. State Department, Canada, Japan, Israel, and the entire European Union have named Hamas as an Islamic terrorist organization.

As you can see by the reaction of the Palestinian Terrorist Organization, Hamas and those who support them, including the United Nations and those nations who despise Israel for being the strong Jewish Nation that they are, they liked the advantage that they gained in their war against Israel under the weak and vacillating Foreign Policy of Barack Hussein Obama.

They are very upset, to put it mildly, that America finally has a President in Donald J. Trump who will honor both his campaign promises and our nation’s friendship with our ally, Israel.

President Barack Hussein Obama placed us in untenable position with his weak and vacillating Smart Power Foreign Policy.

Those who used to cringe in their desert tents, while calling us the Great Satan, laughed in our faces as they walked across our southern borders with the rest of the illegal immigrants.

That is, if Obama simply did not invite them to the White House and meet with them, as he did with the Muslim Brotherhood, the original founders of Hamas.

It was far more lucrative for the UN and the enemies of both Israel and America, when the United States “negotiated from a position of weakness” under the vacillating dhimmi who was occupying the White House.

To survive as a Sovereign Nation, Israel had to had strong leaders, such as the one they have now in Bibi Netanyahu.

So must America have a president who will man up and negotiate from a position of strength with both our friends and our enemies.

In United States President Donald J. Trump, these nations, including those who claim to represent the fictitious country of “Palestine”, now have to negotiate with an American President who has mastered “The Art of the Deal”.

…one who places America and her best interests, first.

Hamas can yell and scream and get themselves shot by IMF rubber bullets until they become so bruised that they all resemble Smurfs, but in the end, bringing in these “returning refugees” would only cause more Radical Islamic-driven violence and blood in the streets.

And, the “Palestinians” can continue to hate Trump all they want. However, moving the American Embassy to Jerusalem was the right move for both America and Israel.

And neither American nor Israel is going to change their minds because in business parlance, it is a mutually beneficial or “WIN-WIN” situation.

Do you ever feel helpless about what's going on? Do you turn the sound down when a member of "The Resistance" speaks? Do you talk back to the television? I understand fully. My blog contains the views of a 61 year old Christian American Conservative. I was raised by members of The Greatest Generation. My father landed at Normandy. I love this country. By the way, how did that Hopey-Changey Thing work out for ya?

I have been writing daily since April of 2010. I enjoy researching and sharing my thoughts with you. It is a privilege and it beats the heck out of punching a hole in the wall.